Wish Fulfillment & Lucid Dreaming

Our waking life and dream life are dichotomous in nature; they relate to each other in that each realm is reflected in the other. They also tend to influence each other. What we envision in our dreams, or our dream states, could influence our subsequent actions in our waking life, and vice versa. If you find yourself pining after someone in your daily life, you may find images of this individual in your mind when your head hits the pillow. Should you dream up a scenario in which a person in your life is put in a negative light, you may unconsciously treat this person negatively in your waking life.

Images produced in our dream life invariably affect how we experience our waking life, and the same could be said of our waking life affecting our dream life. We begin to develop subconscious ideas about the people in our lives: their attitudes, behaviours, beliefs, and how these relate to us. We may also begin to develop ideas about ourselves, our own motives, attitudes, personality and so forth. These ideas lay just below the surface of our minds in our waking life, and come to light when we dream.

This creates a constant cycle of our waking life feeding our dream life and our dream life feeding our waking life. This cycle continues with each new dream our minds compose while asleep, and with each new day we experience while awake. The times in which our subconscious ideas merge with our conscious ideas is when we are able to recall events in our dreams and seriously ponder about their meaning, validity and the impact they may have on our waking life. At this juncture, we are able to consciously feed into our dream life, potentially influencing what it is we dream while asleep.

Those with particularly creative minds (those who find themselves daydreaming, pursuing abstract thought, painters, musicians, writers and so forth), may be more capable of creating a dream image and seeing it to fruition. The more open-minded one is with dreaming and their individual dream-life, the more realistic it is said person will be able to fabricate dreams, and recall them like memories.

Sigmund Freud wrote extensively on dream-life and dream-work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) being his magnum opus. He showed us that dreams act primarily as a form of wish-fulfillment. He determined that by analyzing our dreams, and breaking apart the dream-work by comparing the latent with the manifest content and so forth, we may be able to determine aspects of a persons personality, and thus their neuroses. Dreams help us understand what lies beneath— the unconscious mind. With this greater understanding of the unconscious mind we can then piece together areas of a persons life, determine which areas need focus, and essentially fix what is wrong with a persons mind, and by extension their personality/behaviours/attitudes.

Before Freud happened upon this idea of the interpretation of dreams he studied with Breuer, and their work focused on the use of hypnosis (Studies on Hysteria;1895). These studies in Hysteria and hypnosis helped Freud develop Psychoanalysis (“talk therapy”) as a means to assess and cure patients of their mental ills. Although hypnosis has been denounced as “quackery” and de-valued to the point of it being nearly too ineffectual to even mention, we need to consider the philosophy of hypnosis for arguments sake.

Hypnosis is the practice of inducing a state of consciousness whereby the person loses autonomous thought/ability, and is susceptible to the suggestions of others. Interestingly enough, the word Hypnosis comes from the Greek “hypnos” which translates to sleep, and the English “osis” which is a suffix that denotes a process or condition. This is important to recognize.

Klimt, Gustav. (1913). The Maiden.

Consider the act of hypnotic induction and an individuals heightened suggestibility. Essentially, during hypnosis, a client is influenced by and directed to fulfill the wishes of the hypnotist. Typically upon “waking” from the hypnotic state, the client is unable to recall what they did while hypnotized. If we compare this to our sleep state we find the two are quite similar. Although we dream many times a night (typically each REM period we experience), we may not recall every, or even any, dream that occurs throughout the night. However, our dreams are important in that, as Freud recognized, they fulfill our wishes. Our dream-life is a voluntarily induced hypnotic state. We voluntarily fall to sleep, and our minds wake to project purposeful animated images throughout the night. If we stopped dreaming, our ego-id-superego triad would cease to work, and we, in our waking life, would devolve back to our animalistic tendencies. Dreams act as a catalyst for psychic release. What we are considering here is our ability to induce hypnotic sleep, and control our dream-life in a way that manipulates our wishes into being fulfilled.

Could we truly control our dream content to the point where our waking-life wishes come true in our dream-life? And if this were to happen, to a sufficient degree, would these wishes become worthless in our waking-life?

When considering this we first have to consider day-dreaming. Day-dreaming is a lucid state of dreaming that occurs while awake – and most often we have full control over the content of our daydreams. It is much easier to manipulate our day-dreams, and easier to note any changes that occur. Most people who day-dream do so as a source of entertainment, a way to pass the time, as a creative exercise. But how many truly assess the content of their day-dreams? How many question the content and it’s meaning? If we are able to focus on the content of these dreams and are able to treat them just as we would dreams that occur while we are asleep (documenting them in a dream-journal, noting themes, characters, colours, images and so forth) we would be able to understand the potentially unconscious aspects of these dreams (particularly noting wish-fulfillment). One could argue that day-dreams are practised specifically for wish-fulfillment.

Now, is there any real way we can transmit what we learn from our day-dreams into our sleeping dreams? If we induce sleep in a similar way as inducing hypnosis, perhaps we could be successful. I believe the most promising method for this is to repeatedly imagine what it is you would like to dream about once you fall asleep.This may be as simple as “practising” a day-dream prior to falling to sleep. An alternative method could be to repeatedly envision dream images while entering a trance-like state (similar to meditation).

It would be interesting to see if we are successful in manipulating our dream content toencourage wish-fulfillment (wish-fulfillment being directly related to real-life waking dreams, not particularly in the oedipal/eros/thanatos sense). Then we must ask what effect would this have on our waking-life? How many times would we need to fulfill our wishes in our dream-life before they become null in our waking-life? Would they merely satisfy the wishes for a set period of time?

We can think of this issue from a drive-reduction theory standpoint (Hull, 1935). Drive-reduction theory helps us understand learning and motivation; we experience drives (we are hungry) and when we fulfill these needs (by consuming food) we reduce the drive. Humans are then in a constant state of drive-reduction. This theory can be applied to our dreams and wish-fulfillment in that our wishes act as our drives (motivations) and, should our dreams successfully fulfill those wishes, they act by reducing our drives (wishes). In this sense will our wishes ever truly be fulfilled merely through our dreams? Would our drive be reduced in waking life if our drive has technically been accommodated for in our dream-life?

The rate of success of our wishes being fulfilled also depends on our individual perception of the fulfillment (does the dream suffice, is the success experienced in our dream-life potent enough to actually negate the need for the wish in waking life)? It is also important to think of our dream-life and waking-life as being the same (in that they are both planes of existence that we experience) yet different in that they are altered planes of existence. What happens in our dream-life has the potential to be illegal or immoral in our waking-life, our dream-life does not follow the same societal rules as our waking-life. Which is the real plane of existence? Is our waking-life actually our dream-life and vice-versa? Are both planes so closely related that it would suffice for a dream or a wish to be fulfilled in one or the other? If we fulfill a wish in our dream-life and perceive it as the height of our success, would the only real difference be that we do not experience a tangible fulfillment of the wish (in waking-life)?

If our planes of existence co-exist and transmit information one to the next, perhaps it is easier to say we are weaving in and out of the planes, and what happens in our dream-life does reflect in and have an impact on our waking-life.

Consider a man whose sole interest is gaining great success and recognition as a musician. If he were to achieve this success in his dream-life, would he find himself less motivated to achieve it in waking life? When we experience something like sexual arousal, we seek a release (orgasm) and when we achieve this very tangible experience of orgasm, we cease our search for sexual release for some time (until we again build up the urge to experience the sexual release). The same can be said for wishes. Wishes are erotic and romantic, they require close and repeated attention in order to be fulfilled –they need built up energies to be achieved. When we experience a dream (day-dream or sleeping dream) focused on the fulfillment of our waking-life wishes, we are experiencing a psychic release akin to our bodily orgasm. This catharsis which we experience psychically is a very real component of wish fulfillment, when our wishes are fulfilled (to a degree) in our psyche or when we perceive them to be fulfilled, we experience a reduction in our drive to fulfill the wish in waking-life because it has, at least to some extent, been “fulfilled”.

What can we say of those who find their energies and motivations increased after such a dream? Perhaps the dream acts as a facilitator, enlightening the dreamer of what it would be like to fulfill the wish. Recall our example of the man who wishes to be a musician. Perhaps his dream acts as a means to fulfill certain aspects of his wish, to contribute to his self-esteem so that he may venture out and learn an instrument and start the rigorous journey of becoming a musician. Or the dream encourages him to be as happy and fulfilled as his dream-self, which motivates him in his waking life to persevere and become as successful as his dream image.

If our dream and waking planes are as interconnected as we postulate, perhaps the wish-fulfillment that occurs in our dreams is merely a contribution to the overall fulfillment of the wish. A motivator and facilitator.